[RkWard-devel] Preview of rkward 0.4.0

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi all,

the past two weeks I've been fairly active on rkward. Now, I think, a new 
release should be made prepared, soon. I'd like to ask you to do some testing 
on a new preview release, available here:
http://rkward.sourceforge.net/temp/rkward-0.4.0pre1.tar.gz

The list of changes is fairly small (appended at the end of the file), but 
actually contains some major items, I'd like to point out:

1) RKWard is now fully UTF-8 aware. There should be no more problems passing 
non-ascii characters back and forth (this actually puts rkward ahead of the R 
console version in that respect).
2) The object browser / "workspace" now includes objects from all loaded 
packages. Unfortunately, on slow machines, this may take a few seconds on 
startup (even though the mechanism of generating the object list has been 
made much more efficient than before). Right now the main benefit is that you 
can explore all the datasets and functions available in R. However, this is 
also the basis for future improvements such as code completion and function 
arguments hinting.
3) The object list is updated automatically, the update button in 
the "workspace" browser is (close to) obsolete. Try creating new objects in 
the console, or assigning new values (also e.g. assigning a function to a 
symbol that was previously a data.frame). Obviously this is a pretty basic 
feature, but for a long time I thought there was no good way to do it at all, 
so I'm quite enthusiastic about this new featue. Naturally, some issues 
remain, but it's ready for some serious testing.

With these changes, I think rkward will make a large step forward - if there 
are not too many new bugs / usability issues. So please do some testing, if 
you can find the time, and point out all deficiencies you find.

Regards
Thomas

---------- current ChangeLog ----------
- the object browser is updated automatically when needed
- allow some more configuration in object browser
- include all package environments in object list
- use more efficient data passing to synchronize object list
- add (ugly) items for functions and lists to object browser
- internal cleanups (partially to make porting to KDE4/Qt4 easier)
- when saving/loading the workspace, save / restore all windows (not just data 
editors)
- remember workspace url after save as
- fix a long standing (but hard to trigger) crash while closing data editor 
window
- fix "Open R Script File" filename ending filter
- add mismatching brace detection to syntax highlighting
- yet another crash on more than 100 rows bug fixed
- RKWard should now be fully UTF-8 aware. All characters are passed to and 
from R reliably
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